Crisis in Turkey The news from Turkey is terrible, and the US State Department thinks it is good news.
Since the US is, for many reasons, committed to an alliance with Israel, our options in the Middle East are limited. Note I make no comment on the Israel Alliance: it is as much a fact as the daily sunrise, and it is not going to change without tearing the nation apart.
But it limits our options as to allies. Given the reality of the US-Israel alliance, our choices of other allies in the Middle East were in effect confined to: The Shah of Iran (but not the mullahs); Saddam Hussein and the Baathist party; and the Kemalist Secularists in Turkey (but not necessarily the people of Turkey). For a while we could cultivate the multi-party coalition in Lebanon, but when we failed to support that regime by sufficient force -- a combat brigade would have done -- but we didn't send that, and when we lost those Marines in the barracks explosion we abandoned Lebanon to its fate.
Jimmy Carter threw the Shah under the bus in the name of democracy. He did so with the full approval of the State Department. Then came the mullahs who invaded our embassy -- even George Kennon said we should have considered that an act of war and invaded Iran -- and Iran became a "democracy" which is to say an Islamic Republic, and instead of the Shah's mild cooperation and control of the Persian Gulf (he simply took the Shatt al Arab from Saddam Hussein) we had the Islamic Republic denouncing Israel and the US as great Satans, etc.
That meant we had to turn to Saddam, and we did, making him our man in that region. He was a terrible man, but he was a secularist, and he was able to contain Iran. Iran vs. Iraq with mild US support were a pretty even match. But Saddam got ambitious. He had a reasonable claim to Kuwait, and when he expressed it, the US Department of State "professional Foreign Service" diplomats failed to make it clear that the US could not tolerate an invasion of Kuwait. Instead our ambassador gave Saddam a message that wasn't anything like clear, and which he took to be permission to proceed. Whereupon the First Gulf War, which I opposed at the time.
That crippled Saddam and turned him even more devious. It also made it much harder for him to contain Iran. To shore up his positions in the Middle East he became more and more anti-Israel. Meanwhile in Washington the policy wonks saw Iraq as a great opportunity to establish something that looked like a democracy in Iraq. All we had to do was depose Saddam, and install some friend of the west as the new leader, and Iraq would evolve into a democracy. Wouldn't that be great?
The result wasn't quite as expected. It was compounded by sending Bremer a State Department Foreign Service Professional, perhaps the least prepared pro-consul in the history of empire, to muck up what the Legions had accomplished. The result is that we have deposed the Sunni/Baathist/secularist leadership Saddam had assembled, and we are busily installing a Shia government which will have learned little and forgotten nothing; and being rather fervent Shiites, they look on Israel as an enemy to be humiliated and eventually dismantled.
Thus of our three potential allies in the Middle East the US, largely under the influence of the Professional Foreign Service Diplomats of the Department of State, has eliminated two of them.
That brings us to Turkey and the Kemalists.
The Asia Times article
http://www.atimes.com/
atimes/Middle_East/JG22Ak02.html
will tell you a great deal about what is happening over there. My contacts within the Turkish army are concerned: if the Army does not act fairly quickly, the secularist Constitution installed by Kemal Ataturk will fall, and Turkey will become a full fledged Islamic Republic.
And our State Department will cheer and cheer. So, I suspect, will Obama.
Of course this will eliminate the last possible ally of the US in the Middle East. Sure, we will continue our nominal alliances with the Saudi kingdom (whose mullahs hate us) and some of the other states over there. And yes, some of the Trucial States and Emirates are developing rapidly and appear to be secularizing; but they don't have much in the way of a military, and will be no match for a new wave of the Flame of Islam.
And the US is sliding into a Depression with Inflation. We simply cannot afford long term continued intervention in the Middle East, not without some expectation of return, and we seem to have foregone the notion of making the war pay for itself. War can feed war, but not if you don't try.
Note that our one major ally in Iraq is the Kurdish semi-state we have created: and that is of course anathema to the Turks, both to the Army and to the Islamists. And I have heard neither Obama nor McCain address this dilemma or any of the problems. I suppose McCain to be more of a realist than Obama, who must rely on professionals to advise him about both military affairs and foreign policy, since he has no experience nor studies nor direct knowledge of either; but I haven't heard much from McCain on what he would do about US policy with Turkey.
(And yes: the Kurdish situation is in part Turkey's fault. Our original battle plan called for invasion through Turkey into the Kurdish regions of Iraq. That would have given us a full Division up there, and we would have had the preponderance of military force; but when the Turkish parliament (not the Army) decided to forbid our troops to jump off through Turkey, the military authorities in Iraq had no choice but to accept the aid of the Kurdish Militias, giving the Kurds considerable control over their own region. Of course they then used that control to launch raids into Turkey.)
As to what we can do, I am not sure: things are coming apart rather rapidly in the Near East. I predicted as much before we invaded Mesopotamia. It's hard to see a good outcome: precipitate retreat (removing our combat troops on a published time table) isn't a great idea. Trying to stay the course and install some kind of constitutional government that will protect the rights of all three major factions in Iraq -- Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish -- plus the smaller secularist class -- may or may not make sense, depending on your estimate of the outcome. It this even possible?
And invading Iran will be overstretch beyond belief; I think even the maddest of the neocons and policy wonks understand this now.
Time is very much on our side regarding Iran: the country has fewer and fewer young people, but those there are are being affected by our cultural weapons of mass destruction. Iran has only a few years to be any kind of regional power for the Islamists -- provided that we don't help them by invading or bombing the country, which would unite Iran like nothing else.
Time is not so much on our side in Afghanistan, where a few brigades of combat troops sent in early would have given us control without the long war of attrition that ensued after the collapse of the Taliban. Of course all that was predictable, and predicted (here as well as elsewhere). One primary dictum of military strategy is don't urinate on them, kick their butts: in other words, send in more than you need to get a job done. Military conquest on the cheap doesn't work in the long run. The wonks didn't understand. And Obama is pretty well a captive of the wonks, far more so than McCain.
And here we are, in this Year of Grace 2008.
And perhaps I am entirely wrong. Perhaps both the Department of State and Obama understand the Middle East more than I do, and know what needs to be done: but I have seen no signs of that. In fairness I haven't seen much evidence that McCain knows what he is doing either. And clearly Rice has no control of the Department of State.
Alas, Babylon.
from the Chaos Manor Blog (the oldest blog on the planet) by Jerry Pournelle see the link on the right side.
Dr. Pournelle is one of the best informed men on the planet, if read Chaos Manor regularly you be be constantly be amazed by the breath information.
Stoneknives
